学术论文

We study how vertical market structure affects the incentives of suppliers and customers to develop a new input that will enable the innovator to replace the incumbent supplier. In a vertical setting with an incumbent monopoly upstream supplier and two downstream firms, we show that vertical integration reduces the R&D incentives of the integrated parties, but increases that of the nonintegrated downstream rival. Strategic vertical integration may occur whereby the upstream incumbent integrates with a downstream firm to discourage or even preempt downstream disruptive R&D. Depending on the R&D costs, vertical integration may lower the social rate of innovation.

An agent performing risky experimentation can benefit from suspending it to learn directly about the state. ‘Positive’ information acquisition seeks news that would confirm the state that favours experimentation. It is used as a last-ditch effort when the agent is pessimistic about the risky arm before abandoning it. ‘Negative’ information acquisition seeks news that would demonstrate that experimentation is futile. It is used as an insurance strategy to avoid wasteful experimentation when the agent is still optimistic. A higher reward from risky experimentation expands the region of beliefs that the agent optimally chooses information acquisition rather than experimentation.

In an environment subject to random fluctuations, when does an increase in the breadth of activities in which individuals interact together help foster collaboration on each activity? We show that when players, on average, prefer to stick to a cooperative agreement rather than reneging by taking their privately optimal action, then such an agreement can be approximated as equilibrium play in a sufficiently broad relationship. This is in contrast to existing results showing that a cooperative agreement can be sustained only if players prefer to adhere to it in every state of the world. We consider applications to favor exchange, multimarket contact, and relational contracts.

本研究考察了社会排斥对消费者视觉密度偏好的影响。基于七项实验研究，我们发现认为自己被社会排斥的消费者与不感到被排斥的人相比，对有密集图案产品的评价更正面。之所以会出现这个现象，是因为社会排斥会引发一种心理的空虚感，而密集的图案提供了一种「被填满」的感觉，有助缓解空虚感。当消费者进行填充某些物品的动作或体验到「时间密度」的感觉（即一个排得满满的日程，需于短时间内完成许多工作）时，这种效果会减弱。研究结果揭示了消费者基于社会因素对产品所形成的审美偏好，为营销人员、设计师和政策制定者带来实际参考价值。

Using brokerage mergers and closures as natural experiments, we examine how exogenous changes in the information environment affect a firm’s financing choice. Our difference-in-differences approach shows that exogenous increases in information asymmetry lead firms to substitute away from equity and public debt toward bank debt. Firms with higher risk tend to substitute equity for bank debt, and firms with lower risk tend to substitute bonds for bank debt. The effect of the change in the information environment on a firm’s financing choice is more pronounced for firms with worse information environments, such as those with few initial analysts and younger firms. We demonstrate that the mechanism of the change is through a reduction of the issuance of equity and bonds but with an increase of the issuance of bank loans. Further analysis reveals that such firms tend to reduce long-term borrowing, reduce their issuance of subordinated debt, and increase their revolving credit lines.

We analyze the design and performance of equity auctions when bidder's valuations and opportunity costs are private information, distributed according to an arbitrary joint density that can differ across bidders. We identify, for any incentive compatible mechanism, an equivalent single-dimensional representation for uncertainty. We then characterize the revenue-maximizing and surplus-maximizing equity mechanisms, and compare revenues in optimal equity and cash auctions. Unlike in cash auctions, the adverse selection arising from bidders' two-dimensional types in equity auctions can lead to a global violation of the regularity condition, which represents a maximal mismatch between incentive compatibility and maximization of revenue or surplus. Such mismatch can lead a seller to exclude bidders and demand a bidder-specific stake from a non-excluded bidder, providing insights into when a firm should employ an auction and when it should just negotiate with a single bidder.

The rise of credit default swaps (CDS) provides creditors with a market-based approach to obtaining protection, but it can also affect lenders' monitoring of the borrowers. We find that after CDS begin trading on a given firm, new loans to that firm are less likely to require collateral and have less strict financial covenants, even controlling for endogeneity. The effects are stronger when lenders have easier access to CDS, for safer firms, credit lines, and performance-based covenants. Our evidence is consistent with the theory that the introduction of CDS trading makes loan contracting more effective for better quality borrowers.

We provide a meta-analytic examination of the regulatory strategies that employees adopt to cope with different types of stressors in the workplace and how these strategies are linked to work and personal outcomes. Drawing from regulatory focus theory, we introduce a new taxonomy of promotion- and prevention-focused coping that complements the traditional taxonomy of problem- and emotion-focused coping in the transactional theory of stress. In addition, we propose that challenge stressors tend to evoke promotion-focused coping, whereas hindrance stressors tend to evoke prevention-focused coping. As a pair of important coping mechanisms in the work stress process, promotion-focused coping is positively related to employees’ job performance, job attitudes, and personal well-being, whereas prevention-focused coping is negatively related to these outcomes. We conducted an original meta-analysis of coping strategies in the workplace and tested the hypotheses with 550 effect sizes drawn from 156 samples that involved a total of 75,344 employees. We also tested the tenability of the proposed stressor-coping-outcome processes using meta-analytic path models and further examined the robustness of these models using full-information bootstrapping technique. The results converge to show that promotion- and prevention-focused coping serve as important intervening mechanisms that account for the relationships between work stressors and individual outcomes.

The Dodd-Frank Act shifted regulatory jurisdiction over “midsize” investment advisers from the SEC to state-securities regulators. Client complaints against midsize advisers increased relative to those continuing under SEC oversight by 30 to 40 percent of the unconditional probability. Complaints increasingly cited fiduciary violations and rose more where state regulators had fewer resources. Advisers responding more to weaker oversight had past complaints, were located farther from regulators, faced less competition, had more conflicts of interest, and served primarily less-sophisticated clients. Our results inform optimal regulatory design in markets with informational asymmetries and search frictions.